Making Millions Improving Mobility & How to Beat LinkedIn | My First Million #184

Sam Parr

With this guy, Ben from Knees Over Toes, I bet he's doing $10,000,000 a year in sales. And he doesn't even have his own app.

Shaan Puri

let me

Sam Parr

give you some updates real quick podcast numbers some people can I tease can

Shaan Puri

I tease some ideas because I think people might be like, "Why do you guys keep telling us about the podcast? Get to the ideas!" Let me tease the ideas and then you say your thing. Alright, I have four good ideas today. 1. I'll just tell you the names of them: - How to Beat LinkedIn - Super Joints - You're gonna like that one or you're gonna hate it. That's another topic. - Canva for Video Alright, so those are three that I'm gonna throw at you that we're gonna talk about after this. You might have some other ones. Okay, now go back to the podcast update.

Sam Parr

Just really quick, I'll make it quick. Alright, last month we were at 430. This month we were supposed to be at 550. I think we might get to 600, just so you know.

Shaan Puri

that's right

Sam Parr

So, I think that's going to happen. 600,000 listens a month. Some more updates: tomorrow I'm recording with Andrew Wilkinson. I'm doing another one of his things. His things are always the most popular, so I'm going to do another one of those. Originally, I signed up to do this because you just had your baby and I wanted to record more, but you couldn't do it. So, we're going to continue doing that. Tonight, I'm flying to New York. I had this guy reach out to me, some guy named Loeb. He started... what's his first name? I don't even know his first name. Michael Loeb. He started Priceline and he invited me to... he somehow listened to the podcast or something like that.

Shaan Puri

he's the one with the billions house

Sam Parr

Yeah, so I'm going to fly to his house tonight. I'm going to interview Andrew from New York tomorrow. But on June 3rd, Sean and I, along with a bunch of people on my team, are going to be in Austin. We're doing a live event. I think it sold out right away, but yeah, we're going to see what we can do next.

Shaan Puri

We should do something else because it's sold out so quickly. If there are more people who want to do it, we should... I don't know, let's capture their info somehow. Let's just do a hangout. We'll just... I don't know, let's go to a park or wherever. I know we may not have a venue, but let's meet and greet some people who want to hang out or something. I don't know, let's do something. Let's go to a bar. Who cares?

Sam Parr

and then the next day we're gonna do miami so we got june

Shaan Puri

3rd Austin, June 4th, Miami. If people want to attend, Austin is already sold out, but there's an Eventbrite for it. For Miami, we're putting up the Eventbrite.

Sam Parr

And that one can seat 150 people, so that'd be cool if we sell it out. But maybe we won't, who knows? It should have plenty of room. Last thing, we've got some cool...

Shaan Puri

The way on the pod, we shouted out. We said, "Mayor Suarez," to the Mayor of Miami. We said, "If you're listening to this, we need a venue. We need blah blah blah." He replied on Twitter, saying, "I got you, let's talk." Then, somebody else came through and was just like, "Here's the venue." I don't know if we want to shout out their name, but somebody hooked us up with a sweet venue.

Sam Parr

we'll hook them up we'll shut them out next time because I've asked them exactly what they want us to shout out

Shaan Puri

gotcha okay

Sam Parr

So, I've already asked them last things. Alright, we got a couple of guests coming up. The first one is Mark Lohr. Mark Lohr started Jet.com, which he sold for $1,000,000,000... I think $3,000,000,000. I think so. That guy's cool.

Shaan Puri

and he started something before that I think it was a diapers.com

Sam Parr

Yep, and he just bought Amazon. He just bought the Timberwolves, an NBA basketball team. Dude, I'm such a dork; I don't even know.

Shaan Puri

yeah with with a rod a rod bought the the timberwolves

Sam Parr

And then we have Mike Maples coming on, who people probably don't know, but he's a pretty big name in venture capital. He's funded a lot of startups that you all know. And then finally, Bill Smith. It's a generic name, but do you know who Bill Smith is?

Shaan Puri

He... you love this guy! Dude, you are... this is like your new obsession: Bill Smith. Yeah.

Sam Parr

I'm going to tell you why. He started a credit card company in his twenties and sold it right away for **$1,000,000**. Then his second hit was starting **Shipt**. Shipt was based out of Alabama; it was basically very similar to **Instacart**, but he self-funded it and then sold it for about **$600,000,000**. Now he's got another venture called **Hello Landing**, which I think is really badass. That guy's coming on soon. But that's the update: we just hired this guy yesterday. What's his name? **Ibrahim**? **Dan**?

Shaan Puri

off to a great start

Sam Parr

yeah I think it's dan I think kerner is his last name I don't need a

Shaan Puri

We here at The Hustle have a tremendous culture. We really care about our people. Dude, after you're hired, we find out your name and after that we...

Sam Parr

do you know you wanna hear something funny you know ceeva

Shaan Puri

yes

Sam Parr

one of my best friends like one of your closest friends I've known no

Shaan Puri

he's my best friend dude

Sam Parr

well I I've known him for 10 years almost I couldn't tell you how to say his last name

Shaan Puri

yeah see because this is a key see you have a russian name

Sam Parr

so I don't think it's important to

Shaan Puri

sam what's my last name

Sam Parr

I have no idea

Shaan Puri

what's his first name

Sam Parr

I'm well I'm breu andrade but I don't know how to say it

Shaan Puri

you definitely called him a brew for a while

Sam Parr

I just don't think you need to know someone's name. I mean, I try really hard to remember people's names. I hate when people say, "I'm bad at remembering names," so I always try to remember someone's first name. I don't think you need to know someone's name really to know them well. I'll just call them "Bob" or "Chief."

Shaan Puri

Those are the two. Bob and Chief, do you have something in your hand? What is that? That's an idea. Is that a stress ball?

Sam Parr

what is I didn't know you could see this no it's just chapstick I'm just trying to put chapstick on

Shaan Puri

Are stress balls still a thing? I remember when I was a kid, I went to my mom's office, and she and every other person had a stress ball on their desk. Now that I think about it, I haven't seen one of these in like 10 years. What a great idea! What a genius name and invention to just be like, "How do I sell this 5¢ item to every worker in a cubicle in America?" Let me call it the stress ball. Let me tell you that this gets rid of your stress and just make it kind of fun to fiddle with and play with. Why aren't more people doing that? Right? We have fidget spinners for kids; we need the stress spinner for adults. I want to invent the next little silly putty gadget thing that you feel addicted to playing with on your desk.

Sam Parr

good luck I mean I mean if anyone's gonna be able to do it it's gonna be you

Shaan Puri

I had these things on my desk that I used to fiddle with. I think it annoyed everybody because it kind of made a little bit of a sound. But that's who I am at work. I breathe loud, I chew, I eat at my desk. You know, I'm that guy you hate at the office. So, I had this thing that was like a little magnetic toy or something. I don't know what it was, but there were a bunch of tiny little blocks that are magnetic, so they stick together. Whatever shape you put them in, it just sticks in that shape. You can pull them apart and stick them back together like a magnet. These things are so addictive. They weren't meant for playing with at your desk, but they're really effective. So maybe I...

Sam Parr

will yeah those things

Shaan Puri

Maybe it will come out with a line. By the way, I've kickstarted a task to make us dope merch. Not to make money, but because I just want to wear our own stuff. I figured out the first two items that we need to have in our merch line.

Sam Parr

Well, the first one is easy. That one's a notebook. So, like the joke that we get in the comments, which is, "You know, don't listen while driving because you want to take notes and you'll crash."

Shaan Puri

Yeah, we are known to be more dangerous than drinking while driving. It's actually outlawed in several states.

Sam Parr

I hope a notebook is one of the 2

Shaan Puri

A notebook, okay? Notebook is one, and that's actually in motion. So, for the course I'm making, I found this illustrator, Janice, who's amazing. I put out this tweet: I said, "Who's the next Jack Butcher?"

Sam Parr

I saw that

Shaan Puri

And then I got a bunch of replies. I found this guy; he's amazing. You know, don't tell Jack, but I think his stuff might be better than Jack's. Jack's more clever, but this guy's actual illustrations are amazing. I told him, I said, "Hey, I've been using this thing called the Self Journal or something like that for a long time. I think the founder of that listens to the pod." I forgot.

Sam Parr

do you know her name catherine catherine

Shaan Puri

Yeah, great product! We should come up with a limited edition notebook. I’ve got that in motion, and I’ll run it by you. But the merch stuff that I was thinking about was when [someone] came on, and we were trying to beat around the bush, being like, “So, you’re like super rich, right?” And then he was like...

Sam Parr

I'm post yeah

Shaan Puri

The most humble way possible was like, "I'm post-economic." And then I was like, "Oh fuck, that is... that is it. That is the best phrase." So now I'm getting hoodies made that just say "post-economic," and you know, those will go out to anybody who wants to buy a post-economic hoodie. So that's the best one.

Sam Parr

that's a good one and is that the so notebooks and post tech

Shaan Puri

The other one that I was thinking about... You know how we have our Harvard shirts because we visited the campus? Yeah, so I think I might sell some bootleg Harvard merch before they shut me down. All it is, is it's Harvard. Yeah, I've been there. Or like, you know, "Love that campus."

Sam Parr

or yeah

Shaan Puri

I'm was there in '04, like Harvard '04, and on the back it says, you know, like "tours." So maybe a Harvard one. But the real one that I want to make is, you know, kind of like the Harvard style of a sweatshirt or sweater, where it kind of looks like, you know, you're a scholar, right? I went to this school; that's where I learned, that's where I got my education. But it's just going to say "the internet." It's just going to say "internet" or it's going to say "YouTube," because that's where I learned everything. There are a lot of other people that are like that too, where everything they learned was just through the internet. That's who we should really be giving credit to for our education. So I'm going to make a university-looking piece of apparel that's just either calling out the internet, or YouTube, or Twitter, or something like that.

Sam Parr

I think the post economic thing will make money

Shaan Puri

well it has to that's by definition alright so so anyways let's do

Sam Parr

you wanna talk about canva for video or do you wanna talk about super joints

Shaan Puri

No, let's do Canva for video. I stole this idea from my buddy Sully. He tweeted this out, asking, "Who's creating Canva for video?" I've had this same idea. If you don't use Canva, you're probably not going to fully understand this concept. Not just because of the metaphor, but when I describe it, you're going to think, "That sounds simple." I'm sure there are things like that that exist, but no, there’s not. So, Canva, why don't you give the demo on Canva? I'll talk about why Canva for video needs to exist.

Sam Parr

Yeah, Canva was started in Australia about eight years ago. I did some research, and they have a $15 billion valuation and $500 million in revenue. What's cool is that the CEO, I think her name is Melanie, is like a superstar. When you hear her talk, you're like, "Oh, whatever you say, I'm in." She and her husband are the two co-founders, which is pretty badass because collectively they own 30% of the company, even with a $15 billion valuation. They crushed it! Basically, the product allows you to create really simple images. A lot of times, people use Google Slides, like I do, where you put an image on there, write some text, and then stick a screenshot. With Canva, it's all a little bit more intuitive, and you can make really, really simple designs.

Shaan Puri

good looking design

Sam Parr

good looking design it's like photoshop for 8 year old like me

Shaan Puri

it's yes photoshop for people who don't know photoshop that's the best way of describing it so before when you wanted to make a marketing brochure a flyer for your event you know a a a instagram ad a whatever any kind of image or graphic to go alongside your product or your event or whatever it is you would be like great let me ask my designer friend to make one or let me go into like you know paint or one of these you know Google slides or powerpoint or whatever and try to make one myself and it always came out looking budget like you made it yourself or you had to overpay somebody who knows photoshop who has graphic design skills who knows that this should go at this angle and that this is a cool way to do a collage and like to do a mask and whatever so what they did was they just created this enormous library of templates so you go on there and you say great I wanna make an ad for a sale well guess what a lot of people have that problem and so what they did was they just created or surfaced 100 of templates of sale you know how to how to present a sale if you're a store so now I don't need a designer I just go in there myself I change the text I drop my image into where their image is and it's like nicely cut into a circle automatically or it removes the background automatically without you having to know how to do that with the magic wand in photoshop so so that's what canva does it's amazing it's grown like crazy like you said 500,000,000 in revenue done very well I think it went public not long ago so canva does that for images and they kinda have some like animation stuff but nobody has done this for simple videos so I'm talking about the whole world has moved to video whether it's long form like netflix medium form like youtube short form like tiktok even shorter form like a facebook ad or an instagram ad and it still requires people who know how to edit video in order to make a simple video and and that's crazy to me and so there's people who've tried to attack this from many angles I would say that what a lot of people try to do is they try to make figma for video which is like they take imovie and they say no it should be in the cloud you should be able to have multiple people using it at once you see each person's mouse moving around the screen and it saves it all to cloud blah blah no I think you need canva I think you need off the shelf ready made video like short video clips that you just swap and replace your text and your images or your video clips into those and there's some things like this that exist but nobody has cracked this and that I think canva is most likely to do it I'm sure they think about this all the time you know they're it's not like they're listening to this and saying oh my god genius we never thought about video right but like I do think it's a gnarly problem and I think if you are focused on this you can outflank a lot of people just by finding the right library of of templates and then getting the the ux right where you can make it easy to swap out text and images with your own stuff

Sam Parr

So, I think that this might be a great idea, but I'll default to pessimism just for the sake of argument. I think there are a few reasons why this would be really hard. The first reason is that, well, this is actually the main reason: more people use videos and image-based content than they do video-based content. So, at a company, most employees—well, not most everyone, but a very large percentage—would want to use text-based content. Whether you're making just a silly graphic for an internal email, creating a sign that says "Happy Birthday" for your employees, or even making a social media post, you're mocking up a website, yada, yada, yada. By the way, someone made fun of me for saying "yada, yada, yada." I'm not going to say it anymore. But anyway, there are so many different instances of that, right? Is there actually that many people that...

Shaan Puri

Would you need a dude for videos? Yes, okay. It's the internet. Text is massive, images are massive, and video is massive.

Sam Parr

they're all

Shaan Puri

massive they're all super massive

Sam Parr

how many people write words on facebook and twitter then make videos on youtube

Shaan Puri

Like, but it's a business use case. So if you're a business, you need to be doing all three: you need to be creating text content, you need to be creating image content, and you need to create video content. You do them at different times. The video content is often the one that you need; that's the highest value to you, and it works the best in terms of getting people's attention. There are tools to do this, so I shouldn't say that there aren't. Right? Promo.com is one of them. Promo.com has a bunch of templates to let you create videos. I've used it; it is good. It is probably the closest thing to Canva for video. There's a startup called Motionbox.io; they're doing this, and it looks pretty cool. I haven't actually had a chance to play with it yet. Kapwing is a big one too.

Sam Parr

I've heard

Shaan Puri

Of that one, it's really popular. That one's more for memes, so they made it really easy to make video memes. We talked about Piñata Farms also to make video memes.

Sam Parr

When I was moving out of San Francisco, I posted on Twitter that I was selling my gym. The founder of a company tried to come and buy all my gym equipment. That's how I met Kaplan.

Shaan Puri

the founder of which one

Sam Parr

kaplan yeah

Shaan Puri

Nice, that's great! So, here's my take on what's the opportunity here. The opportunity for me is that I should be going and trying to invest in all of these companies. I think this space is going to be big. These are all viable companies, and they're all at different stages. I'm going to try to put a check into all of these because I'm such a big believer in that space. Really, but the other thing is... yes, for sure. The other thing is, if you're building, how would you differentiate? I think one of the ways to differentiate, the one I would do, is to focus on Facebook ads. I've talked about this before, but if you think about it, Facebook is one of the largest companies because it makes a ton of revenue. How does it make its revenue? From advertising. Who's advertising? You know, 100 of 1,000, if not millions of businesses that advertise on Facebook. If you can do things to help them advertise—either save them time or make their ads better—you’re going to make money on either one of those two axes. I've found that Facebook ad tech is, of course, there are companies in that space, but there are much fewer than you would think. There are a lot of people that try to build on top of platforms, and I think that the Facebook ad platform is a great place to build products. If you make someone's life better, you are either making them or saving them a lot of money. So, it's not hard to capture, you know, your $100 a month if you're able to do that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I think it's cool. I think that there's a... I'm gonna just default to bad stuff because that's the dynamic we're taking right now. But the dude selling stuff for $200 a year, that software is so freaking hard. So, are you on your computer right now or are you on your phone? Yeah? Computer? Alright, Google "Buffer revenue." Okay, so Buffer is this awesome company. I mean, it's kind of awesome, and they are one of the first people that made sharing their revenue famous. So if you're listening out there, type in on Google "Buffer revenue," and you're gonna be taken to a... I don't know what the platform's called, but it's some type of platform where you can see all their revenue. What's the revenue look like, Sean?

Shaan Puri

So, this post that was from late 2019 stated that revenue is $21,000,000. They have 75,000 customers and they make a quarter of a million dollars per employee.

Sam Parr

go to revenue go to buffer.com/revenue

Shaan Puri

Right, so their current one... Yes, actually, this is... Yeah, so it flatlined out. So that's the number I said: 2019 was the peak. 2020 was the same, and 2021 is the same. So it's still at **21,000,000**.

Sam Parr

if you're listening go to buffer.com/revenue and they're gonna see all their revenue it's pretty amazing well it

Shaan Puri

says $26 of revenue per account

Sam Parr

Yeah, and so what you're going to see... Here's what you're going to see: the revenue on this buffer thing goes up really fast and then it plateaus. That is what happens when you sell products that cost $20, $50, or $100. It's incredibly hard to keep going. I study a lot of these graphs. For example, ConvertKit has another one. There are many, and if you look at the metrics, if you Google "average price for SaaS," there's a lot of research on companies that go public and how much their software costs. There's this dead zone of around $200 a year or $300 a year or something like that. It's incredibly hard to build a big company when it should cost that much. Some people have done it; Mailchimp has done it, Canva has done it. I think it's almost impossible for most other types of people to do it.

Shaan Puri

Well, we are talking about Canva for video, so I'm going to hope that it falls into that category. I actually just want Canva to do this because...

Sam Parr

am I wrong though am I wrong

Shaan Puri

You're not wrong in that there's an effort to acquire customers. It costs money and it takes time. If your size of the prize is $26 or $99, it is very hard to get to the goal you're talking about, which is going public or being a multibillion-dollar company.

Sam Parr

No, but my thought is not necessarily... If you're listening to this and you want to build something, that doesn't have to be the goal. But when I think about stuff, sometimes I think (now this isn't always, but sometimes) it's far easier to be a small fish in a massive market than it is to be a big fish. You know, like... I'd rather be the shitty person in something that's just booming because it'll be way easier to crush it.

Shaan Puri

It, yeah. Although you also say, you know, "niches get riches," type of thing, right? Where you'd rather be a big fish in a small pond.

Sam Parr

Well, I said I don't always think that way. I'm saying like if I want to build something that can just make a good living, then yeah, that's one thing. If I want to create something that could take off, I would probably want to do it the other way.

Shaan Puri

Right, and I think the thing you just said that's important is you mentioned a market that's booming. That's different from a big market. A big market is an already established market, while a market that's booming is a growing market. So, if I were going to rank the three, I would say: **small fish in a booming market**, then **big fish in a small market**, and lastly, **small fish in an already big market**.

Sam Parr

yeah I think I agree with you can we talk about superjoints

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

I looked it up while you were talking and I have a lot to say about this

Shaan Puri

okay well I I don't even know what you looked up this was my own name of a idea I had so is there

Sam Parr

any oh super joints is do you remember so we talked about the book happy body

Shaan Puri

oh okay okay yeah yeah super joints let's go here first

Sam Parr

Super Joints is also the name of a book at Google. Super Joints looks just like The Happy Body.

Shaan Puri

yeah it looks exactly like it like 19 seventies or eighties like design

Sam Parr

but we don't have to talk about that I I thought well

Shaan Puri

The thing I was thinking about is, my mom is staying with me right now. She's been here for the last few days. You know, my mom has always got some ache and pain. She does a good job of trying to exercise and stretch, and you know, whatever she can do. We bought a special pillow for the bed so that when she's in bed watching TV, she's not in a crappy posture or whatever. We try things, but this is an every-aging person problem. You know, you get a bad back, bad knees, bad hips, bad shoulders, or wrist pain. This stuff comes up. I started thinking, okay, this is going to be a massive, massive market that nobody really is able to do much with. So I thought, what is the solution? I think there are two solutions. I think the end solution is fixing it from the inside. That's some version of stem cells or regenerative therapies where you're able to regrow cartilage or strengthen the tendons, or do something like that to reduce the irritation and inflammation. I don't know too much about that, and I don't know where we're at in the stem cell world. Then there's fixing it from the outside. I thought, oh, this might actually be easy. I was watching somebody move a couch. My neighbor had a truck, and they were moving. One person was just using a dolly to move this huge couch and bookcase and all this stuff. It got me thinking, man, with these simple tools that man has made, you have so much leverage. You can lift heavy objects. Why don't we just have these as a little knee brace that people wear? It could just help you when you're trying to get up. It's like a little spring action that acts as a super joint. It is a sort of external fix to the problem of joint pain.

Sam Parr

that sounds like such an infomercial thing I can I can I can imagine this now in my head

Shaan Puri

Exactly. That's exactly what I thought in my head. I see the old lady sitting on the couch. She's trying to get up and she's struggling, and then it fades.

Sam Parr

the black and white yeah

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it fades to black and white and she's in pain. Then it's like her again on the couch, and she gets up... she just gets up effortlessly because she's got this little thing she wears around her knee that essentially acts like a spotter as she does this motion. I just thought, "Why do we have spotters for carrying our own body weight?"

Sam Parr

what do

Shaan Puri

you think of this

Sam Parr

I think that that you're cool I think

Shaan Puri

it sounds like some shitty alibaba product that you

Sam Parr

I think you're thinking about this talk to her totally wrong. What you're talking about is like a silly brace. I want to actually solve the problem. There are three companies that I've been paying attention to that are in this space, and they're all centered around mobility. What I've noticed among my friends and the people in Austin now is that a lot of them are less focused on lifting heavy weights and more focused on this manly version of yoga that we call mobility. Right? It's yoga, I mean, it's some...

Shaan Puri

I'm doing mobility training

Sam Parr

yeah it's are you stretching

Shaan Puri

yes you're stretching

Sam Parr

It's a little bit more interesting than yoga, and I do it a lot as well. So, there are three things that I like. There's one called **The Ready State** (thereadystate.com). There's another one called, I actually don't know how you pronounce it, but it looks like it's **GoWOD**. So, the word "go," and then I think it stands for "Workout of the Day." I'm a paying subscriber of it; it's great. Then the third one is **Knees Over Toes**. Have you seen **Knees Over Toes Guy**?

Shaan Puri

dude I'm all into this

Sam Parr

I've done the whole program it's wonderful oh you did I've done the whole thing it's so good so basically

Shaan Puri

did you have vertical leap go up

Sam Parr

Yeah, but it all works wonderfully. I love it! Basically, the first two that I've described are Gowad and The Ready State. It's an app that you pay $100 for. The founders of Gowad actually messaged me after I talked about them on this podcast about two years ago, or maybe a year and a half ago. They said, "The numbers that you're saying are way smaller than we actually are." I think I said they were doing half a million a month in sales, right? So, they're both apps where you spend 30 minutes a day, and they just do stretches. It's the simplest app ever; it's just a video that shows you a stretch and counts down from 60 seconds. The other thing is this guy named "Knees Over Toes Guy." That's his handle, and his name is Ben Patrick. He went viral on TikTok and Instagram. I found him on Instagram, and it's basically this crew of guys, and he's like the leader. They're these quote "manly men" who look strong and fit, but they stretch a ton. They're really focused on one-legged pistol squats and being able to touch their toes.

Shaan Puri

Should say he's called the "Knees Over Toes Guy" because in classical training, they're always saying, "Don't let your knees go over your toes." They thought that's how you get injured. That's when you're doing a squat wrong or a lunge. "Oh no, you're not lunging right! You want your knee to never go past your toe." If you're biking, they always say the same thing: adjust your seat height so your knees don't go over your toes. This guy was like, "Hey, I blew out my knee. I tore my ACLs." He started trying to figure out how to actually strengthen my legs and my knee so that I don't get injured again. In fact, he ended up getting stronger through his self-experimentation. Now, he's, I don't know, 43, 45 years old. I forgot how old he is; he's in his forties or maybe even his fifties.

Sam Parr

no is he that old

Shaan Puri

He's got a 43-inch vertical leap. He can dunk. He jumps higher now than he did in his twenties, and he's been athletic the whole time. It's just that now he strengthens his legs in a way that breaks all the rules. His approach is intentionally to let your knee go over your toes. Why? Because we want to stabilize our knees when they're in these uncomfortable, compromised positions. We'll do it in a controlled way now so that you don't get hurt later. So that's the theory behind this stuff.

Sam Parr

And this guy has almost 500,000 followers on Twitter or Instagram. He is putting on an absolute master class in marketing. I followed him, and like, because I'm an internet guy, I know exactly what he's doing. I'm like, "It's working! It's working!" I bought it. He charges $50 a month, and the reason he charges $50 a month is because the churn is probably astronomical. The average user, I bet, only stays for 3 months. When you do the program like I did, I just wrote it down. I'm like, "Oh, I know exactly what to do." It's just like, right? It's as basic as a PDF. So, I know what to do, but he got my $150 over 3 months. I got results; I loved it. The way that this guy is getting... he's basically doing, you know, the best person I've ever seen at this fitness marketing is that woman, Kayla Itsines, I think her name is. She has an app called Sweat that scaled to $100,000,000 in sales. If you're a guy, you probably don't know who she is. My wife, Sarah, used it, and she crushed it. All she did was sell PDFs, and then eventually it went to an app. With this guy, Ben from Knees Over Toes, I bet you he's doing $10,000,000 a year in sales, and he doesn't even have his own app. There are all these apps called Trainerize and similar apps where what you do is you just put your program on their platform and give them a little tiny cut of the revenue. It's a pretty amazing business. I mean, the high churn, but like, it looks like a really fun lifestyle business to run.

Shaan Puri

Totally! It's what we were talking about with Judge Judy and Michael Buffer last episode. I think we discussed building a personal monopoly and finding your niche. That's what this guy did—brilliant branding. The "Knees Over Toes" guy, right? Beautiful, beautiful branding to latch onto that. It's different... It's sort of, I don't know if you remember, but one of my core content beliefs came from the guy who writes "Wait But Why." Actually, his buddy—there are two guys behind it. So this is not Tim Urban; it's the guy who helps him with his business, Andrew. He was nice enough to take a call from me one day. I said, "Yeah, I'm thinking about my content and what's the strategy, what's the brand?" He goes, "I have a really simple way of thinking about it." He said, "You know, in The Matrix, we have Morpheus who reaches out and says, 'Do you want the red pill or the blue pill?' Meaning, do you want to keep living in your fantasy land of the way that you were told things are, or do you want the truth?" That's the red pill—the harsh red pill that you gotta swallow. Neo chooses the red pill because he wants to know the truth. He basically said that's the best way to build your content brand: by giving people red pills. So, if people think one way or society tells you X, I'm gonna tell you the truth and here's why. That's what the "Knees Over Toes" guy did. It's a perfect red pill. Everybody says, "Don't move your knee over your toe." I'm the "Knees Over Toes" guy! He built his niche there, he built his brand there, and he went viral on TikTok by showing some pretty amazing stuff. Now, he's translating that into a business. I have a quick opportunity for somebody who wants to do this. One of the things that he does in his program—you tell me, you did the program. My trainer takes pieces of the program and gives them to me. But did you buy that gadget that you wear on your foot? The monkey foot thing? Yeah? And who did you buy that from?

Sam Parr

the monkey foot guys

Shaan Puri

It's, I think it's called "Animal House Fitness." Is that who you bought it from? Yeah? And is that his brand or is that somebody else's brand?

Sam Parr

it does not appear to be his but I didn't respond

Shaan Puri

To it, okay. So, **Knees Over Toes Guy**, if you're listening, this is for you. Or if you're not going to do it, we can pair you with a hustler who's going to do this. You need to be selling this device, okay?

Sam Parr

so wait yeah go

Shaan Puri

So, what this thing is, it's a boot. Imagine a ski boot that you put on your foot and step into it. Under the boot, you can put a tiny little dumbbell. You can use a £5, £10, or even a £15 dumbbell. Then, when you do leg extensions or knee raises, you have weighted resistance. This helps you build strength faster. It's one of his core things. Did I miss anything on it?

Sam Parr

Yeah, he also makes slant boards. I think that there's an entire brand to be made around this. I wouldn't call it masculine because I think women like this too, but a non-yoga-esque... I don't want to go as far as to say it's feminine, but you guys get the idea. Like a... well...

Shaan Puri

It's gotten cooler because Tom Brady, you know, the greatest quarterback of all time, came out with the TB12 program. The Tom Brady 12 program. People are like, "Great, Tom Brady, you're still playing! You just won the Super Bowl last year." I don't know what he is, 42 or 43 years old, so he's the oldest quarterback to win a Super Bowl. How are you still playing? He credits basically that he eats super clean. He doesn't do strength and explosive training; he focuses on flexibility, mobility, and pliability. That's what he emphasizes. He's like, "That's how I don't get hurt."

Sam Parr

brother and we talked about this a year and a half ago I was all about this I've been you

Shaan Puri

were talking about the subreddit you visit right which is a yes mobility subreddit right

Sam Parr

Yes, I've been all about this. The reason I'm all about this is you can feel it in your body. I do different athletic challenges, and I have done challenges where I try to get incredibly strong. I know how I feel; I'm like, "Oh, I feel kind of swollen. I feel bloated. I don't feel awesome." Then I do these things where I just try to squat all the way down with my butt on the ground with no weight. I'll just sit there for, you know, 10 minutes, or I'll just work on flexibility. I'm like, "Oh, I feel so alive. I feel so much better." I've been talking about this forever. I just sent you an Instagram post about a guy named "The Flexi Bowl." That's another amazing name! I love "The Flexi Bowl." You immediately know what it is—it's a strong person that's flexible. So anyway, I'm all about this niche of, I don't know what we're going to call this, like "flexibility culture" or whatever it is. I think that these things are the best. I think there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this space. I've seen a few people; I've seen this one guy with a bunch of things called "The Human Garage." You go there, and they stretch you. So I love all these things. I'm totally enjoying it.

Shaan Puri

I also have seen that the mobility tests go semi-viral. So I saw something, or I don't even know, maybe it's me or my mom... I don't know. One of us saw it, then they shared it with the other, and then everybody in the family did the test. All it was is this "get up" test. So you sit on the ground...

Sam Parr

indian style

Shaan Puri

cross legged

Sam Parr

oh sorry it's indian style not pc

Shaan Puri

I think it's about the Native American Indians. So, you know, you might piss off two groups if you say it. But yeah, you sit on the ground "Indian style," as we used to say back in second grade. Then you're supposed to get up, and the idea is that for every part of your body that you have to use to touch the ground to get up, you sort of deduct a point. So, like for me, when I'm sitting like that, first of all, I can barely even sit like that. Second of all, if I have to get up, it's like a process, dude. It's like roll to the left, now I'm laying down. Elbow on the ground, forearm on the ground, hand on the ground. Second hand pushes me, now I'm in a push-up position. Now I get to my knees, now I stand up. I stand up like an 80-year-old. And the test says you basically have the fitness of an 80-year-old; you have the mobility of an 80-year-old because you start at 7 points and you deduct a point for each part of your body you use to get up.

Shaan Puri

For everything that touches the ground, something like that. So then I did it, and then my mom did it, my dad did it, my sister... it's like everybody does it. There's something interesting there. Let's say you wanted to build a program like this or sell a tool like this. There's something interesting, like we talked about last time, about personality tests, IQ tests, horoscope tests. People's most interesting subject is themselves. Similarly, here, I think you could build a following or an audience by giving people a simple diagnostic, a simple test. It's like the kind of "can you pat your head and rub your belly at the same time?" It's like everybody wants to try it when they hear, "Oh, that's hard! That sounds easy," right? I saw one the other day that was like, "Take your arms to the side, reach them straight above your head, and then keep your arms straight." So do it. Yeah, keep your arms straight. Yeah, so you're okay, you're not so bad, but like you're tight. You can see you're tight.

Sam Parr

yeah I'm tight my lap

Shaan Puri

So, if your bicep is able to touch your ear while maintaining straightness and crossing your hands, then your shoulders are adequately flexible and mobile. If not, then you want to do these three exercises to improve that. I love this model of diagnosing the problem and then prescribing your solution. I think that would be a cool way to grow this. But I'm with you that, hey, flexibility, mobility, and pliability are where the fitness trends are going right now.

Sam Parr

And to wrap it up, I'll say it's never been easier to make money off this type of thing. This guy, Ben, the "Knees Over Toes" guy, as I said, doesn't have his own app. He's using Trainerize, this other app. You can literally launch this today, today, with $20. Alright, do you want to talk about LinkedIn stuff or what do you want to Google?

Shaan Puri

Let's do LinkedIn stuff. So, you said something the other day. You mentioned, "This guy lives down my block, and he created... I don't even know what it was. Some guy who's done something cool. He's built some cool business."

Sam Parr

student loan hero

Shaan Puri

right and you were like he lives I don't know how long he lives like down my

Sam Parr

10 doors down

Shaan Puri

ten doors down alright so great so I don't know how you found that out but

Sam Parr

I'll tell you, it's pretty funny. I tweeted a picture of myself in front of my new house, and he DM'd me. He goes, "I don't wanna be weird, but I know that house. I lived on the rock."

Shaan Puri

And that's a cool moment! You met somebody who's kind of professionally relevant to you and also locally relevant. What does that mean? I think there's an opportunity to build a location-based professional network or professional networking tool, especially now that the world has gone remote. You have a bunch of people relocating. You have people getting out of offices where they would normally be seeing peers and coworkers all the time. Most people think the answer is to create a co-working space or some kind of flexible workspace where you go to work and that's where you're going to get professional interaction. Well, I've actually seen this other trend, which is discovering people who live around you that are interesting business people you would want to meet with. You both kind of opted in to being like a guy...

Sam Parr

learning this from

Shaan Puri

Well, I'm saying I had a similar experience the other day. I did a call, and the guy's like, "Where do you live?" I said, "Oh, I live in this little place right outside of San Francisco." He goes, "Oh, my friend just moved there," or "My friend lives there too. He's the, you know, chief product officer at [blankety blank] company."

Sam Parr

which company

Shaan Puri

And I was like, "Oh, sick!" Well, I don't want to give out his identity or whatever, but it's a company... don't worry about it. It's a well-known company. He's like, "Oh yeah, he lives there too." And I was like, "Great! I'll intro you guys. You should hang out." Because, like, it was like, "Oh, you know, we could be friends and we live near each other." So that's the excuse of why we might actually hang out. I thought that's kind of interesting. What if you could get people to basically just say, "Here's my job and here's where I live," or "Here's where I am," and it just notifies you about other people that are also there and are kind of professionally relevant to you? If you could kind of figure out people's... I don't know, without being a douche, but like if there's a CEO you kind of want to talk to, or other C-level people, serious guys... yeah, not like the product manager of some other company that's not super relevant to you. So I think that would be kind of cool as a way to bootstrap a new style of professional network and a new style of interaction.

Sam Parr

And first of all, let's even mention that LinkedIn is... freaking everyone says the same thing: LinkedIn sucks. How does everyone use LinkedIn, and yet we all use it? Or a lot of people do. I don't use it anymore, but you get the idea.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, it is used, and it is still the number one, even though we all say how much it sucks. I think what that means is you have to find an angle that's not a direct angle. You can't beat LinkedIn by just building LinkedIn again and saying, "But I have better features! I have better design!" That's not going to work.

Sam Parr

So, the best angle... Every time I see so many companies that are trying to beat LinkedIn, I think it's a worthy thing to try to do. I believe it can be done, and you can build a big business. If you can't unbundle them or crush them, you could still do pretty well. The only times I've seen people gain any traction is when they divide it up into subgroups. So, it's typically by race and typically by gender, I think.

Shaan Puri

It could be industry-specific. Like AngelList did it with startups. AngelList basically took the whole startup companies' jobs and candidates off of LinkedIn and just said, "We can do this better."

Sam Parr

I've never seen it done really with industries. I don't totally agree with that assessment because you're kind of right. Yeah, I guess you are right, but I do... I haven't seen many. I've seen a ton of women-focused ones. So there's "Girlboss," and there's this other one called "Levo." I think it was called L-E-V-O.

Shaan Puri

like also girl boss failed right so yes to be fair

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but there's Chief.com, which I have no idea if it's succeeding or not, but it certainly seems like it is. There's a lot of Black-focused ones too. I don't remember all their names, but I remember seeing them float around, and they seemed mildly successful. Like, they have some traction, but obviously I'm not a user. But I've seen race and gender-specific LinkedIn alternatives.

Shaan Puri

So here's the ones that I think have worked: I think AngelList worked, right? $3 to $4 billion company. And if I'm a startup, I might have a LinkedIn, but with all of my startups, I've found better luck finding jobs and candidates through AngelList. Dribbble did this, yep. So Dribbble was like... if you're a designer, LinkedIn's kind of... it's hard to show that you're a good designer there.

Sam Parr

I would say behance did it better than dribbble because they had a $175,000,000 exit

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so, design. Let's just say you're putting your portfolio up there. You're networking with other designers, and then other people can come find images. They say, "Who made this?" and then they basically hire you, right? So I think that was kind of successful.

Sam Parr

get github

Shaan Puri

GitHub for developers. Exactly, that's another one. Then there's the low end, where it's like Upwork, right? It's just like they went, you know, kind of like geography, like you were saying. Upwork basically says, "Here's a way to find workers, can find jobs, and jobs can find workers." But we're going for kind of like outsourced labor arbitrage type of thing. So I think those have all worked. Now, here's a different take. Here's a company I invested in that I think has a cool chance of beating LinkedIn. I want to describe their strategy, but I don't want to use the Silicon Valley jargon. You know this word "orthogonal"? No? Have you ever heard people say this? That it's like, "Yeah, you have to take an orthogonal angle," or it's an...

Sam Parr

orthogonal like orwell orwellian

Shaan Puri

No, it just means you don't go directly... like you don't beat LinkedIn for, like, okay, here's the example. Let's say you think PowerPoint sucks. You're like, "I'm gonna build a better PowerPoint." The way to build a better PowerPoint is not to make slides that are easier to create. It's to look at the fact that people use slides to give their bosses presentations about how the business is doing. Actually, the orthogonal way to attack that is to build dashboards that automate them, that are always automatically updated, so your boss can just check. And now you don't even need slides, right? So that's...

Sam Parr

like a long

Shaan Puri

long haul attack

Sam Parr

to build the best hotel business you don't create better hotels necessarily you get other people to list their homes

Shaan Puri

You get Airbnb. Exactly. So, "orthogonal" just means sort of attacking it from another angle. So here's an orthogonal attack on LinkedIn. There's this company called Pallet.xyz. Have you seen this?

Sam Parr

pallet how do I spell it

Shaan Puri

Pallet, P-A-L-L-E-T dot X-Y-Z. I think that's the name. You're not going to learn too much from this, but I'll tell you kind of like where you could see that. How did...

Sam Parr

you find these guys dude how do you find all this shit man

Shaan Puri

Bro, I've already given people the secret sauce, which is to be super curious, surround yourself with interesting people, and then share it. My crew, I think Ben found Pallet, or maybe Zach found Pallet. I'm not sure if somebody found Pallet, but I talked to the guy behind it. He's awesome! He's like a 23-year-old ex-Stanford guy. You just talk to him and think, "Oh, okay, you're gonna win." Whether it's this business or the next one, or the next one, or the next one, you're gonna win. You're clearly super smart and way ahead of your time in terms of just polish as a CEO. You're an engineer and you recruited other good engineers. Great! But what he's building is actually pretty cool. We found him because I am pretty interested in what I'm calling the "creator stack," or basically the solopreneur's playbook. I look at people like Pump. Right? Pump is a creator; he creates content in the niche of crypto. Say who Pump is.

Sam Parr

I I actually don't think everyone knows

Shaan Puri

Okay, his name's Anthony Pompliano. He's kind of like a friend of ours; we don't know him super well, but he's friendly. He's come on the pod, and we've been on his pod as well. He's super well-known. He used to work at Facebook, then he was like, I don't know, chief something at Snapchat. He left really early on, or like, it didn't last very long. He went on his own and started creating content about Bitcoin in like 2016 or 2017. As Bitcoin got more popular, he got more popular. So, he's got like, I don't know, a million followers now. He's got a Substack with 170,000 subscribers, you know, like paid subscribers.

Sam Parr

something ridiculous a bitcoin media personality but like he's he's on cnbc to talk

Shaan Puri

and then bitcoin happens pump tell us is it good or is it bad

Sam Parr

and he's kind of a troll on purpose like I I like pump but he like he like fucks with people

Shaan Puri

I don't call him a troll. I think someone said this in a way that was derogatory, but I actually think it's a good description of people like this. They called him a "carnival barker," which is basically like your hype man. It's someone who's going to just keep pounding the pavement and keep knocking on doors, saying the message, right?

Sam Parr

I don't mean to call disrespectfully I mean like he's funny like he's like he's a shithead yeah

Shaan Puri

And he has a good time. He's got a good personality and he's extremely talented with content creation and branding. So, we'll talk about one of his other projects that just came out. But anyways, my friend Pump created this job board called "Crypto Jobs" or something like that. He's like, "If you want a job in crypto, I'm a trusted guy in crypto. If you want to work in crypto, here's my personal job board." I thought, "Oh, that's kind of interesting." We've talked in the past about job boards. Andrew Wilkinson talked about how good of a business job boards are. I thought, "I wonder how successful individual creators' job boards could be." The reason I'm interested in this is because that's kind of like my career path—being a creator. I think about the previous wave, like Tim Ferriss and those guys. They didn't have any of these different business models. They didn't have rolling funds, they didn't have ghost kitchens, and they didn't have job boards as a way to capitalize on their audience. They just sold books, and that was kind of it. Now, creators have a whole different arsenal of ways to make money, one of which is a job board. So, he did this with Pump. He did it with Pallet. Pallet does this with, you know, Lenny, the kind of like the product management guy. So, Lenny's got a job board. If you want to become a PM, you could just go to LinkedIn or Indeed. But if you're a PM and you follow Lenny and you love his content about being a better PM, it kind of makes sense to find a job there. Pallet is the job board software that all these creators use.

Sam Parr

bro you think that's gonna be a huge thing I've created job boards use a wordpress plugin

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so here's the difference. This is like a classic mistake, which is: "What? Webflow? Dude, I could use Wix, right? Like Shopify... I could do this on Squarespace." It's like... there is a benefit to when something really focuses on a use case and a niche and attacks it from a different way. So what they did was they built this job board thing to go to creators or community. So like for The Hustle, you guys could... The Hustle could be... Do you guys have a job board or no?

Sam Parr

We launched one as a test. How did it do? It didn't do well, but I wouldn't say it's because the idea is bad. It's just that when we were deciding between trends and something else, that "something else" was a job board. We were like, "Yeah, let's do this other thing."

Shaan Puri

so these individual creators guess how much they're making off their job board I

Sam Parr

would love to know I don't know give me a guess

Shaan Puri

what do you think lenny's making off his job board

Sam Parr

a $100 a year at most

Shaan Puri

So I don't want to blow up these guys' own economics, but let's just say I looked at 10 of these and I looked at, okay, how much money do each of these make? People of their level of fame, which is like... they're not truly famous, they're like *niche famous*.

Sam Parr

yeah internet famous

Shaan Puri

Quarter million dollars and up really pop. Pop, I think, is gonna make about $1,000,000 off his job board this year. He's gonna make money off his job board and he doesn't have to create content every day. He doesn't have to, you know, get on... right? So his newsletter, he's gotta write a fucking newsletter every morning, right? Like that's his... people pay him $9.99 and he's gotta write the newsletter every morning. The job board, that's just for free after already building the audience. So he...

Sam Parr

doesn't need the brand what's the business model for pallet

Shaan Puri

so they basically take a percentage of whatever the creator's making

Sam Parr

so and so how does the creator make money

Shaan Puri

Creator makes money because the companies that want to access talent in that niche pay $500 or $1,000 to post their job. So, let's say they pay $1,000 per job posting. They're going to get candidates that are highly qualified. The creator can do two things. They can take some of the jobs and boost them, basically saying, "If I were you guys, these are the companies that I would go work for." So, you can endorse the jobs. You can also endorse the candidates. You can take your audience and instead of just saying, "Hey, my full audience is this," you can say, "Hey, these 400 people are kind of like the top, the cream of the crop in terms of my audience. These guys are like the superstar talent." So, you actually have to pay more to access them. When they match with this, when you post a job, I will actually specially message those people, and that's kind of like a premium offering. They basically give you the software to do this. The reason I think this is interesting for LinkedIn is that LinkedIn is one giant central job board, basically. That's the way LinkedIn makes money. I forgot...

Sam Parr

we were even talking about linkedin

Shaan Puri

So, I think this is a distributed version of LinkedIn. It's basically saying nobody is going to build a 500,000,000-person social network for professionals again. That's LinkedIn's advantage. But what if, instead of 500,000,000 people on one network, you had 50,000 people on, let's say, 100 networks? Do the math. You split it where, like, one example they have is there's a community of developers who all write Angular. Angular is a JavaScript framework. They have a big Discord of thousands of Angular developers. Well, they should have a job board for people who are trying to hire developers who write Angular. That would be the business model for running that community. By putting in all the hard work and running a great Angular community, the job board would be a great way to monetize it. If I'm an employer, I'd rather go to the Angular community and post on their job board than just post on LinkedIn.

Sam Parr

wow so this is this company they've like raised legit money

Shaan Puri

who pallet

Sam Parr

Yeah, they're not like a... it's like a... I mean, they've raised $4,000,000. Yeah, it's like a startup startup. That's pretty wild. So you kind of turned my opinion on this. Who all... anyone interested invested in this besides you?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, a lot of the creators are like, "Holy shit, this is great! I will invest in this and I'll be a user of it because this solves a problem of mine." If I've done all the hard work to build a free audience, build trust with them, and establish myself as an authority in a niche—whether it's design, product management, developers, backend engineers, or machine learning experts—I'm in. Once I've done that, if you have a way for me to monetize that doesn't require me to get up there and either teach or write content every day, I'm in. The economics seem to work. The more niche job boards that get created through this network, the better. Now, when a company wants to post a job, you can say, "Hey, you came here to post on the Angular community, but we have these five other job boards that are all for developers. Would you like to cross-post?" This can help give more reach on the job and assist those creators in earning more money without having to market themselves.

Sam Parr

So, these got... yeah, you changed my opinion. It's pretty dope. The reason why it's interesting is the way that you described it was far better than what I thought it was going to be. Is ZipRecruiter... do you know ZipRecruiter?

Shaan Puri

I know the ads. I don't know what they do that's different. It's... oh, that's the same thing. It's one place, and they will post on Indeed and they post on all the job boards, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, so ZipRecruiter at the time, and still could be the case, they were the fastest-growing company out of LA and the largest Series A company ever. Meaning their valuation was the highest ever for a Series A, and I believe it was... it's crazy how times have changed, but like their Series A, they valued them at like $100 million. Now it's way different. And what they do is... you... so they raise... I'm looking at now, I think...

Shaan Puri

they're are they not like public like they they advertise on bill simmons' podcast like yeah

Sam Parr

They're probably close to their Series A. They raised at a $300 million valuation. Unfortunately, that's considered small now, probably. But they...

Shaan Puri

they're they're going to go public

Sam Parr

Yeah, they're public size and they make $100 million in revenue. What you do is they make a really... so what was that term? Orwellian? What's that?

Shaan Puri

orthogonal orthogonal

Sam Parr

That's a good term; I'm going to steal that one. So, what they've done is a couple of things. If you told me what they're trying to do, I would actually say, "Oh wow, this is way too complicated. I don't think this can work." But basically, they do a couple of things. The first thing is that they make it really easy to post your job anywhere. You just click, upload the job description, and it posts in every single place. You don't have to go to each one, and that's why an employer posts there. The second thing they do is, once they got all these people to start posting their jobs on ZipRecruiter, you can now go to ziprecruiter.com and it says, "Look for a job." So, they get recruits right there. Then, on the back end, they've now created a way that you can manage your hiring process. The way that they make money, I believe, is by offering software. You can pay a fee to get access to the CRM as well as post for free, or you could do a one-off where you have to pay for it to be posted in all the places. The strategy works really well, so I'm on board. I think ZipRecruiter is great.

Shaan Puri

But it's one of those things where I don't know if this idea is going to work. I thought it was worth a bet, so I invested. I'm talking my book a little bit here, but it's more like all startups are unlikely to succeed. I wouldn't say the probability is that they go defeat LinkedIn. It's just that I thought, "Oh wow, that is smart." Actually, you're not going to build a 500 million person social network. That's just so hard. You have to ask, who's going to be able to do that? Instead, if you just say, "Well, all these individual creators and communities are already building their own little networks," what if I created a decentralized job board? The job board, instead of being in one spot, actually lives in each one of their little communities. That makes sense to me because, like our friend Andrew, you know Andrew Chen—my favorite person who blocks me on Twitter—your good buddy. He's got a great growth blog, and then you know a lot of growth marketers.

Sam Parr

he used to post growth

Shaan Puri

If he had his own growth job board, he would, you know, with essentially zero work, probably be making, I don't know, easily $150,000 a year or $250,000 a year from companies that want to hire growth hackers and growth marketers like Andrew. That would be a better, more targeted place to hire someone from than going to this sort of general sea of job applications. So I think that part is what made sense to me with this. Although I was like you when I first heard this. I didn't even want to take the meeting. I was like, "Great, bloggers are going to become like blogger job boards. What the hell is that?" I remember reading once that I couldn't get this out of my head, which is like, "They go to Substack where B players teach C players what A players do." I was like, "Oh shit, that's so good. That's such a kill shot."

Sam Parr

who's done that

Shaan Puri

I think it was Hunter Walk. I saw it on Twitter. Yikes! But it's such a good callout, right? In many ways, it's true. The most successful people, the true icons, they're not typically creating a ton of content. Sometimes they do when they retire, or it's part of their growth strategy. But for the most part, Elon Musk doesn't have a Substack. He's not trying to teach you or sell you a course on how to be a good CEO because he just is a good CEO and makes all his money there. So often, it is a B player teaching a C player what the A players do. I think that's a harsh but true critique. You know, I myself feel like that many times. From that angle, I was like, "Oh, will this job board thing work?" But once I looked into it, I was like, "This actually makes a lot of sense."

Sam Parr

Can we speak? This is kind of relevant. Can we wrap up with this thing you have here about "you're never, even when you're late, you're early"?

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

this is a very typical you thing

Shaan Puri

so let's end on a little philosophical

Sam Parr

I asked Sean last week... we said, "Let's come up with a 10-minute short episode." This morning, I get a message from him saying, "I just did it this morning." That's all he said. I click play, and the first line was like, "I just woke up this morning and lost $500,000." I was like, "Oh, hooked! I'm in!" And then [I thought], "We can't run this on Sunday. We have to run this right now." So, what happened? And I guess... what's this "you're not late" type of thing? Do you...?

Shaan Puri

want me to talk about the the thing from this morning or do you want me to talk about this you're not late thing

Sam Parr

this late thing

Shaan Puri

Okay, the late thing... So I was looking back and I was doing a little kind of retrospect. I said, "So I graduate from college..."

Sam Parr

you did it today when you like lost all this

Shaan Puri

no no no no this is like a month ago I was looking back at 2010 and I remember being in college and I you know I had an iphone so I knew apple was the shit I used Google constantly I used chrome and I knew I knew Google was the shit I was a believer in tesla I think I owned tesla shares at like I don't know 20 x cheaper than they are today so I saw all these companies and at the time Google seemed super established right google's been around for for Google had been around in 2010 for so many years right like over a decade + or whatever same with apple was even older right 20 years old they seemed like mature companies they didn't seem like where all the upside was and I looked back and I just did a little analysis I said when I graduated from college how big was Google what was the market cap if I had just invested that day and this isn't like when you say oh if you invested in bitcoin in 2010 you'd be worth a gazillion dollars well yeah that's because bitcoin was worth like 10¢ back then and and it was like nobody knew if bitcoin was gonna be a thing but with Google it was clear it was gonna be a thing apple it was clear it was gonna be a thing facebook it was clear it was gonna be a thing like my whole college was obsessed with it it was obviously gonna be you know somewhat successful and so here's some numbers 2010 when I graduated google's revenue was $5,000,000,000 today its revenue is $55,000,000,000 and you could do the same thing with amazon through facebook and if you had just bought those companies back then you would've made 10 extra money right so like if I had just taken my last year of college tuition and I just said hey dad instead of putting that into into college let's just put it into these 4 companies that like we use their products daily they are already successful they're not gonna google's not gonna tank it's not gonna fail let's just invest in Google you know we would have 10 x ed our money or whatever by now I don't know the exact numbers it's not what's important the lesson is even when it feels late like you're established if it is a megatrend megatrends have way more room to run than you expect some of the megatrends were the internet as a whole internet was a megatrend mobile was a megatrend and apple's been running on that megatrend for a while you know cloud cloud is a megatrend and you see aws aws is big and every year it just grows at the rate of the fastest growing startup but aws is already like you know 40 $50,000,000,000 in revenue and it'll just keep growing really fast and so so I think that mega trends are not to be underestimated and I was listening to this peter thiel thing peter thiel who is like you know investor was one of the first investors on facebook created paypal that sort of thing peter thiel said you know there are many money managers out there you know financial advisors investment bankers mutual funds and they'll all try to pitch you their strategy hedge funds they'll all tell you how they're gonna beat the market how they're gonna do well he goes as an investor often it is the simplest and stupidest strategy the most obvious strategy that is all you need to do he goes in 20 I think it was 2013 or 2012 jim cramer the mad money guy on cnbc

Sam Parr

Who, by the way, I think is pretty awesome. I think he's a pretty good guy, and his picks are not so bad, are they?

Shaan Puri

I think... I don't know. I haven't looked too much into him. I don't know if he's a good guy; I've never met him. But I know that for his part, he's an entertainer, right? He's on TV not because he's the best stock picker. He's on TV because he plays really well in the living rooms of America.

Sam Parr

right

Shaan Puri

And so, anyway, he did something which is what entertainers do. He made up a catchy phrase. He called Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google "FAANG."

Sam Parr

he made that up

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he invented FAANG in 2013. Peter Thiel pointed out that if you had just put your money into FAANG, which are obviously great companies—technology companies that were growing—you wouldn't even need to know how fast they were growing. If you just said, "These are solid companies that seem like everybody in America is using their products," you would have made six times your money in the last eight years. He goes on to say that this would beat the performance of almost any money manager, hedge fund, or investment banker that you think of working with. The problem is that the strategies are too stupid. Even if a financial adviser thought that this was a good bet, they could never charge you the 1% of all your assets that they charge as their fees to just tell you to invest in Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, and then go to sleep—don't touch it for 10 years. But in reality, that was the best advice. He believes the same thing is true for Bitcoin today. The advice is almost so simple that a money manager would be embarrassed to say that this is their strategy. So, they'll come up with a more complicated strategy that will actually underperform. Well, I don't think Bitcoin is chilling.

Sam Parr

I agree with that sentiment. I don't think it's just a money manager thing. I would say look at your actions, and my actions are similar to yours, but we do a lot of silly stuff. You're investing in risky startups when right now you're pontificating that you think Bitcoin is gonna 6x in 8 years. If you think that it's gonna 6x in 8 years, put all your money in it then.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

so I don't think

Shaan Puri

I figure I pretty much have at this.

Sam Parr

And I'm using you as an example... I'm incredibly guilty of this as well. And just... I mean "you" as in a human being, but basically, that's what we do: we mess stuff up because we can't sit still. What's that famous quote? Something like "all of humanity's problems exist because we can't just sit silently by ourselves."

Shaan Puri

a man can't sit alone in a room for 30 minutes

Sam Parr

Yeah, and that's kind of the issue here. It sucks because I'm in the same boat. I know that if I just put it like... I'm even more conservative than saying I'm like the S&P 500. I'm like, "So long as the trailing 100 years repeats itself." If I don't think the trailing 100 years is going to repeat itself, then there are probably huge problems with America, right? So I'm like, as long as that trailing 100 repeats itself, everything's going to be great. Then days like today happen, and I'm like, "Oh, fuck! Gotta do this, gotta do that, gotta do this."

Shaan Puri

Right, yeah. So, I guess I was a little bit long-winded in that I don't think I really nailed my point. When there's a real megatrend, it can feel like it's already played out. Nope, there's a lot more to go. The hard part, of course, is figuring out what's a real megatrend and what's not. But in retrospect, they were sort of obvious. Mobile was a megatrend, video is a megatrend, the internet was a megatrend, and I believe crypto is a megatrend. So, you know, I remember I texted my dad today. I said, "Hey, today's a great day to buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin's 30% off; it's Black Friday." He always badgers me about it. He's like, "You've been talking about Bitcoin since it was at $500. Then it got to $2,000, and I thought it was too much. Then it got to $4,000, and then $20,000. I thought, no way this goes above $20,000." And then, you know, recently it's been sitting at $50,000 to $60,000, and he's like, "Now, if I buy in, I'm buying at $50,000 to $60,000. I should have bought it."

Sam Parr

before do it

Shaan Puri

So, I told him, I said, "Hey, you've been bitching and moaning about this. Here it is, it's at 30-something thousand. Go buy! Now is the time to buy." I know what's going to happen. He's going to think, "Well, now it's in the red. Now it's not hot. You know, now I'm a little bit afraid because the whole market's afraid." So now he'll either not do it or he'll tiptoe in, and then he'll regret it later, like, "I only put in so much." That's just classic psychology of an investor—of a bad investor, I should say. So, I guess the thought process for me here is that if you think this is a megatrend, even at 50K, it's not too late because it still has so much more room to grow if this is true. Now, of course, I could be wrong. It could fall over, it could fail for many reasons. But I think that when you identify these things, one of the worst mistakes you can make is either selling too early because you don't ride out the winner. The second mistake I think you can make is feeling like you're late when history tells us that these things play out over a 20 to 30-year arc.

Sam Parr

I agree with everything. I'm nervous because I don't... I'm not... The most education I have on Bitcoin is you telling me whatever you tell everyone else. This is my education on it because it just doesn't interest me other than sticking it to the man, right? I have doubts, but not... I mean, I'm six figures in, so not that many doubts. But maybe I'll take your advice and do it.

Shaan Puri

Well, I would say... you know, probably the best advice I could give is: **never invest on somebody else's conviction**. Because when they're wrong, it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth. This is especially true if you didn't believe in the investment to begin with.

Sam Parr

Well, I believe in the premise that, you know, the government doesn't control it. No one controls it. It's kind of crazy that, you know... yeah, I agree with the high-level premise.

Shaan Puri

I think you want to... what I'm saying is, I think you want to take somebody's... if you hear my conviction, the answer is not "go do it." The answer is "go learn for yourself" and ask yourself, "How much conviction do I have in this?" Then invest proportionate to your conviction. Because then, at the very least, when you're right or wrong, you're going to assign the credit or blame to yourself. You'll have either a lesson learned if you were wrong, or a lesson learned if you were right about how much you followed your conviction and if your conviction was based in something real. So, anyways, non-financial advice. That's not my... my... was sort of like, I thought it was a very interesting observation that sometimes it's the simplest investment strategies where you set it, hold it, and leave it that actually will outperform. One of the reasons people don't do them is it's almost so stupid it's embarrassing. If that's your strategy, especially if your job is to be an investment manager, financial manager, or financial adviser, then it's really embarrassing to just recommend such a brain-dead approach. But history will tell us that often, that is the best returns.

Sam Parr

great well I think that's a great place to end I always like ending in those rants